1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a device management apparatus which manages a virtual device, a device management system, a device management method and a medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
A technique that assigns devices to respective functions on a network and causes these devices to cooperate to implement FAX and remote copy functions as one device is available. This technique handles a plurality of cooperating devices as one device called a “virtual device”. Contrary to the virtual device, each physical device will be referred to as a “physical device” hereinafter. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-150469 describes a method of displaying all physical devices, indicating their cooperating states by arrows, and displaying the states of respective physical devices as icons upon displaying the state of a virtual device. In this case, the states of the physical devices are determined based only on whether each physical device is abnormal or normal.
Therefore, conventionally, the virtual device user needs to determine whether or not the physical devices can be used as a virtual device by determining upon checking the states of the cooperating physical devices if all the physical devices are normal or any of the physical devices is abnormal. The state of the physical device indicates that of a physical device alone. In this case, the state of each physical device is displayed in detail like “jam”, “reader abnormality”, and so forth. In such case, the virtual device user needs to determine up to which of physical devices in a virtual device has charge of which function, and whether or not the states of the physical devices can implement that function.
Only a user well-informed about the configuration of the virtual device and the relationship between the physical device states and functions can make such determination. For this reason, when one of the physical devices that configure the virtual device indicates an abnormal state, a normal user determines that the virtual device is unusable.